The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (42 page)

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My routine has been to write a page or so on “Artemis”—no more—and mix a drink at ten. This means, since I cannot write and drink, that my working day is very brief. Now, for the first time in more than a month, I have a desk, a lamp, and a place where I can keep my papers. I’m back in a summery country.

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There would not be much point in describing these last days. On Tuesday we were lovers and on Wednesday warriors. I am told that I am an insane shit, that even when I am loving I am a shit. She is planning to leave, which will be the second time this week. What I will forget and never mention is what I heard at dinner. “What is worse for a woman: to marry a man with a bad prostate or to marry a homosexual?” But where does this venom originate? I might say that she dislikes men, but I know this isn’t so. She hates me much of the time, but naturally I can’t understand why anyone should hate me.

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I spend all of the daylight hours immersed in my morbid and clinical obsession. I seem toward dusk to muster a little reason. Mary goes into town to a party, and Federico and I have a pleasant evening together. Should beautiful women read telephone directories on TV I would watch them. Mary returns and I kiss her good night, which is a step, however small, in the right direction.

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So I think work, work, work—that will be the solution to all my problems. Work will give meaning to my unhappiness. Work will give
reason to my life. Twenty minutes later my mind strays to the gin bottle, and I will presently follow.

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When I get the mixture right, as I seem to have done last night, my gratitude is immense, my gratitude is spiritual. Work, work, work, I say, love, love, love, and I can rewrite the first of “Artemis” or sketch in the remaining narrative. Thinking of the booze fight, I seem willing to settle for this battlefield rather than go to a dry-out farm. It is a battlefield, and I’ve been advancing and retreating for fifteen years. The last weeks have seen many losses, but today the enemy seems quiet or occupied on some other front.

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I am disappointed in “Artemis,” disappointed and at times frightened, but I think, later in the day, that I can bring it off. It lacks density and enthusiasm, and my search for another method, a new method, has not been successfully completed. Keep trying.

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The first word I hear on Christmas day in the morning is “shit.” I think perhaps I should have an affair with a man. I will go to X and say, “I’ll let you have me,” and he will laugh and say, “You’re twenty years too late. You might, you just might have passed twenty years ago, but now you’re nothing but a potbellied old jerk.”

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And so we celebrate the birth of Christ. Let man receive his King.

The first day of the new year. No toothache, and I wake feeling very happily horny. I trust the year will end this way.

We walk to the F.s’, where we are shown home movies of the Cairo bazaar and where much that is said seems to have been said before. My little camera is my memory, etc. Later, just before dark, I go to see S., a pleasant woman, with an open fire, who gives me whiskey. A drunken scene, for which I am heartily sorry.

I claim again that the Sunday
Times
derails me. Shovel snow, walk the dogs over the hill. Mary’s sister calls and when I say she’s in Chappaqua she says, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Did they let her come home for Christmas?” “Chappaqua,” I say, “is the next village.” “Oh,” says she, “I thought it was a rest home.”

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Drinking with R. and S. and M., I seem to glimpse—no more—the fact that I can be difficult, ungainly, prone to flare up at trifling misunderstandings. I think of my brother, examine what I remember of his conduct and misconduct, since the end of his marriage resembled in some ways mine. He drank too much, and so do I, although I will not end up in a hospital. He seemed morbidly sensitive to any sort of discrimination. I remember his stamping off the playing field. When I asked him what was wrong he said that P. was cheating. We were playing touch football, bluff was half the game. Sorehead. I trust I don’t do this. He would punish his wife by refusing to speak to her for a week or two. He merely punished himself, of course. We have the same blood, the same memories, and make, I suppose, the same mistakes. Who, after all, is that man who puts a dime in the lock of the public toilet and in this privacy drinks from a flask of vodka? It is I. When? Las
month, last year, six years ago. I seem to have changed more than the airport. The imitation orange drink still geysers in a sort of glass showcase. The coffee is weak. The cock drawn on the toilet door seems a size smaller than it did last time. My hair is gray.

Are these the accents of contempt or is this my morbid sensibility? For example, I mix drinks and ask her to join me. “I have to wash the spinach,” she says. The voice strikes me as unnatural, unwarm. I do not, of course, check on the truth of this. Once I said, “Let’s fuck,” and she said, “I have to find the baking potatoes.” “I’ll find the potatoes,” I said, and I did, but when I returned to the bedroom she had dressed. Saturday night, I suggested again that she join me. I want someone to talk with, but I also feel that the sound of conversation might relax my son. Hours pass when the only voices one hears are electronic. To this invitation she says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” “Well, won’t you join me after you’ve been to the bathroom?” I say. She does, but she holds a book in front of her face. I talk about Lorca, whose poetry she is reading. “I will not be lectured about a book you have not read,” says she, leaving the room. I did not intend to lecture her, but perhaps I mistook my tone of voice. Later—and I may now be as my brother was, moved in the stumbling and ungainly way of gin, half deaf, half blind, responding to some blow that was dealt so far in the past it can’t be remembered—“I won’t listen to your shit.” The raised voice will be heard by my son, and my good intentions have come to nothing. I climb another flight of stairs and watch something asinine on TV.

She is, to say the least, laconic this afternoon. At dusk, she takes the dog for a walk, the first in months. She returns at dark. She is excited. “I saw Josephine, I saw Josephine for the first time since Christmas, and I didn’t have an apple or some sugar for her.” Josephine is a lonely and unridden horse, owned by the superintendent in the next place. Now it is dark and cold, and Josephine’s corral is perhaps a mile away. Mary takes an apple and some sugar and goes off into the winter night. Can I, having dived into the pond in October to pick some water lilies, claim that she is eccentric? I am pleased to see that she is moved and excited, but there is an unpleasant trace of skepticism in my thinking. Later, on TV, a polar bear is murdered. “They’ve shot the mother polar bear!” she cries; and she cries, she sobs. “They’ve shot the mother polar bear!” And I think that perhaps I should go on TV, that if I approached her through the tube on the shelf above the sink I might win her interest and her affection, but I would have to b
disguised as a mother polar bear, or some other wild, innocent, and wronged animal.

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I think of my father, but nothing is accomplished. The image of him is an invention, not a memory, and an overly gentle invention. There was his full lower lip, wet with spit; his spit-wet cigarette; his hacking cough; the ash on his vest; and the shabby clothes he wore, left to him by dead friends. “Let’s give Fred’s suits to poor Mr. Cheever.” I find in some old notes that my mother reported that he had, just before his death, written a long indictment of her—as a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and a woman. I never saw the indictment. I suppose, uncharitably, that the effect on her would have been to fortify her self-righteousness. She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation. Sigh—how deep were her sighs. I have no idea of what their marriage was like, although I suspect that he worshipped her as my brother worshipped his choice and as perhaps I have worshipped mine. In my brother’s case there was, I think, that rich blend of uxoriousness in which praise has a distinct aftertaste of bitterness, not to say loathing. I think that Mary was wounded years before I entered her life, and who is this ghost whose clothes I wear, whose voice I speak with; what were the cruelties of which I am accused? She may look for another lover; I certainly do. Are we, lying in our separate beds and our separate rooms, only two of millions or billions who wake a little before dawn each morning thinking hopefully that surely there is some man or woman who would be happy to lie at our sides? Happy for cheerful kissing, fucking, jokes, the day to come. I suppose we outnumber the felicitous by millions, and I must say that had I been given a loving and uncomplicated woman I might very well have run.

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The terrifying insularity of a married man and woman, standing figuratively toe to toe, throwing verbal blows at each other’s eyes and genitals. Their environment is decorous, a part of their culture. The clothes they wear are suitable for this part of the world, this time of year, this income bracket. There are flowers (hothouse) on the table (inherited). Children sleep or lie awake in upstairs bedrooms. They seem as well rooted and native to this environment as the trees on th
lawn, but at the height of their quarrel they seem to stand on some crater of the moon, some arid wilderness, some Sahara. Their insularity is incomprehensible. This is an abandoned place.

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I read the three stories and don’t much like them. Phony modesty, perhaps. I’ve never much liked my work. The point is not to count my losses but to exploit what remains. I pick up “Crime and Punishment” and exclaim with pleasure over the opening sentence. Halfway down page 3 I close the book and watch TV. So the great books drop from our hands. Skating, I swing my arms, swing back happily into my youth, my childhood. The black ice on Braintree Dam, through which you could see the grasses. The instant the sun went down, the ice made a sound like cannon. And I think of the green valley of the Rorty and the hum of wild bees in the hall of the ruined castle. The sound was so loud you could hear it from the banks of the stream. I was thankful that I had heard nothing so romantic earlier in life. Mary swam in the stream, and the water seemed to magnify the size of her backside. My knees buckled.

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Palm Sunday. Federico and I go to church. During the years that I’ve said my prayers here the priest’s hair has turned white and his eyeglass prescription has been strengthened. J.L. smells of hair oil and toothpaste, a clash of scents. S. seems not beautiful, not at all, but she seems this morning to remind one powerfully of how beautiful she must have been thirty years ago. I remember, years ago, that she cried during the service. Why? The priest, a pleasant fellow, embraces me. I put the palm frond behind the clock, and my house seems truly blessed. I think of the swan, the gorilla, and other monogamous species. It does seem possible on this splendid afternoon that a man and a woman can love each other passionately until death do them part. A lovely hour in bed. Thank God, thank God, thank God, is what I say on waking. Thank God.

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That voice in the dark that gives me so much advice says, “You will not be as great as Picasso, because you are an alcoholic.”

I have a homosexual dream, which deals muchly with the spirit. I do not know in whose arms I lie; I know only that he will take care of me. He will pay the bills, the taxes, balance the checking account, and drive the car through the storm. “Were you lovers?” she asked him. “I wouldn’t use that word,” he said. “It was more like an improvised contact sport, scored or punctuated by ejaculations.”

It was two or a little later. He was woken by his wife, who was crying in her sleep. A heavy rain was falling. She called a man’s name three times: “Matthew, Matthew, Matthew.” Was this in love or anger, and who was Matthew? He knew two Matthews, but neither of them seemed threatening. She went on sobbing, and he thought how puerile was his concept of a woman. He had reduced this continent of memory and longing into a pussywussy, a yummy snatch. The loudness of the rain woke her. “You were crying,” he said. “Yes,” she said, “I had a nightmare.” She moved away from him and fell asleep again.

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I drink gin and read some stories of mine. There is the danger of repetition. Walking in the woods, I heard a man shouting, “Love! Valor! Compassion!” I followed the voice until I saw him. He was standing on a rock shouting the names of virtues to no one. He must have been mad. The difficulty here is that I wrote that scene ten years ago. Oh-ho.

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The hour between five and six is my best. It is dark. A few birds sing. I feel contented and loving. My discontents begin at seven, when light fills the room. I am unready for the day—unready to face it soberly, that is. Some days I would like to streak down to the pantry and pour a drink. I recite the incantations I recorded three years ago, and it was three years ago that I described the man who thought continuously of bottles. The situation is, among other things, repetitious. The hours between seven and ten, when I begin to drink, are the worst. I could take a Miltown, but I do not. Is this the sort of stupidity in which I used to catch my brother? I would like to pray, but to whom—some God of the Sunday school classroom, some provincial king whose prerogatives and rites remain unclear? I am afraid of cars, planes, boats, snakes, stray dogs, falling leaves, extension ladders, and the sound o
the wind in the chimney; Dr. Gespaden, I am afraid of the wind in the chimney. I sleep off my hooch after lunch and very often wake feeling content once more, and loving, although I do not work. Swimming is the apex of the day, its heart, and after this—night is falling—I am stoned but serene. So I sleep and dream until five.

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It seems to me extraordinary that Mary should have summered here every summer of her life; that here is a place, a hill, a dozen simple cottages, and a mountain view that she can return to and find, at least in spirit, unchanged. The famous gardens are dead and so is the gardener. A few roses bloom, choked with weeds, and the three greenhouses have lost some of their panes from the weight of snow, but who any longer wants catalogues of ruin, who any longer studies the sadness of fallen greenhouses? The mysterious spirit of the place—I think it mysterious—remains. There is here and there Charlie’s violin music, Bertha’s second year German Grammar, moldy copies of the
Vassarian
, and Grandpa’s telescope. Things of the past outnumber the new toaster, the new coffee machine, and the new refrigerator. Walking up from the beach, we are unique as one can only be in the summer. Who are they? They are the W.s, and everybody else is less secure, intelligent, and interesting. The cottages are simple frame buildings. Planks are laid on the rafters, and the shingle nails stick through the ceiling. The electric lines are naked and black and are strung through the rafters with porcelain insulators. I wake at night and hear the rain on the shingles. I have not heard this for years. The roof not only receives the rain—there are leaks here and there—it seems to amplify the sound, and with some erotic or infantile thrill I hear the sound increase and louden. Now the storm passes over, the wind blows, and water showers onto the roof. I am three years old.